‘Past Future Continuous’ review: IDFA Envision winner is poignant, formally daring family portrait

Dirs: Firouzeh Khosrovani, Morteza Ahmadvand. Iran/Norway/Italy. 2025. 72mins

How does it really feel to depart household behind in a spot to which you’ll by no means return? And does the trendy reward of 24-hour display screen entry to these distant family members soothe the heartache, or make it worse? These are simply two of the extra simply accessible questions explored on this poignant, considerate documentary by US-based Iranian director Firouzeh Khosrovani and her Tehran-based colleague Morteza Ahmadvand.

Superbly shot with an actual emotional cost

The truth that Previous Future Steady step by step reveals itself to be, to some extent, a fictionalized assemble might bother some viewers, however it’s removed from being a metacinematic recreation. As a substitute, the gradual erosion of its first-person confessional floor appears like a gap up in the direction of the popularity that the trauma outlined right here is shared – an element, maybe, of the Iranian situation.

After premiering in Venice Days, Previous Future Steady has most just lately gained greatest movie in IDFA’s Envision competitors. It’s a piece that pushes formal boundaries, however this four-hander can be fantastically shot with an actual emotional cost – one underlined by Christophe Rezai’s wistful keyboard, violin and viola soundtrack. After a protracted pageant run, it appears well-placed to tempt specialised theatrical programmers and screening platforms.

A protracted mounted shot of a contemporary metropolis seen although a damaged window opens the movie. The snowy mountains within the distance appear painted whereas, within the foreground, rain falls incessantly. We hear two voices in succession: the lady’s hotter and extra confiding, the person’s solemn, even declamatory, as if he’s studying poetry. These two voices shall be our solely guides, and figuring out how they relate to one another shall be one among a number of challenges for the viewers.

Maryam, the lady, tells us that she has had safety cameras put in in her getting old mother and father’ home in Tehran, and pictures from these eight cameras – starting with a view of the highest of the technician’s head as he adjusts the one in the lounge – kinds the spine of Previous Current Steady. Her father was an architect, and designed this low modernist home that appears shoehorned right into a vacant lot, dwarfed by its neighbours. Now, he’s the frailer of the 2 mother and father, shuffling round with a strolling body, whereas his spouse cooks and modifications lightbulbs.

We slowly work out that Maryam has a instructing place someplace within the US, and that she is taken into account persona non grata by the Iranian regime. Earlier than the cameras have been put in, she phoned her mother and father perhaps as soon as every week; now she finds herself following them obsessively by way of the day, cooking the identical dishes she sees her mum making, calling continuously.

Residence motion pictures from Maryam’s early childhood present her mother and father to have been Nineteen Sixties trendsters, a part of the nation’s liberal intelligentsia. Archive materials affords us glimpses of the Iranian Revolution of 1978 and the Iran-Iraq Battle that started two years later – a warfare that claimed the lifetime of a male playmate of Maryam’s that we see in these household Tremendous 8s. There are dreamlike inset sequences – one among them, a repeated picture of a fluttering white chicken – being one among this poised and self-aware movie’s few misfires, with its cliched wedding-video really feel.

The safety digicam footage itself shouldn’t be fairly what we anticipate both: it appears hyper-real, dazzlingly sharp and, whereas we hear no dialog – both from the mother and father or the parrot Maryam sends them when she will bear their loneliness not – the dropping of a glass or the autumn of a sheet from a laundry line are eerily amplified.

Khosrovani’s earlier solo mission, 202’s Radiograph of a Household (on which Ahmadvand served as artwork director) shared a preoccupation with the unreachability of a childhood dwelling, however there we accepted that the household she was utilizing as an instance the fractures in Iranian society was her personal. Right here, in a movie whose remaining credit listing three scriptwriters, two voice-over narrators and two ‘reenactment’ solid members, we all know that one thing a little bit extra sophisticated is happening.